Fic: In the Machinery of Night (Bruce/Jason, PG-13)
Title: In the Machinery of Night
Summary: Later, he will chastise him. Now, he can do nothing more than give in.
Characters: Bruce Wayne (Batman)/Jason Todd (Robin, Red Hood)
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 3741
AN: It’s my birthday, so clearly I must post fic. :D Huge thanks to the marvelous miakun for the beta! Title from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.”
Batman casts a long shadow when he wills it. The silhouette that he has cultivated with infinite care falls across the table in the warehouse, causing a gaggle of gunrunners to drop their cards, gasp and try to push away from the table, tripping over themselves in their sudden panic.
His shadow is still etched across the table when Robin emerges from its darkness, leaping into the fray in a brilliant flash of red and green and yellow.
A few moments later, there is even more red on the scene, oozing and splattering. Batman swoops in, having sufficiently utilized fear to disorient his foes, and dispatches the two remaining men.
Robin, standing with legs spread wide, continues to pound on the leader, whose nose is now an unrecognizable lump on his bloody face.
“Robin.”
Robin looks up, over his shoulder, thighs flecked with glistening red and wide grin irrepressible. “He’s still conscious!” His tone is equal parts defensive and teasing.
It isn’t the response Batman was looking for so he moves across the room in a straight line, stride efficient as he steps over the men he’s knocked cold without a second glance for them. He trusts his handy work.
The gunrunner is still conscious, sobbing and making burbling noises through his crushed nose. It is distasteful, and Batman motions for Robin to move away from the man. He will survive, though he will not be immediately recognizable to his friends upon recovery.
For a second the man looks grateful, until he realizes who has replaced Robin. He tells Batman everything he needed to know, in a garbled, painful rush that, through practice, Batman mostly understands.
Robin languishes against the table, the moonlight that had been instrumental in providing the shadow earlier now shining on him unhampered. His smile is less sharp than it had been moments before, though no more innocent.
Robin used to be more innocent. Batman had to relished that. Now -
Now such open innocence is something he tells himself that he does not desire in his partner. The world has changed.
Robin is still the light to his shadow. The light is simply - brighter, now. More liable to burn. Less innocuous.
More dangerous.
They bind the gunrunners, and exit the scene before any authorities can arrive. Batman will not o explain the men’s conditions to the Commissioner.
When they fly over the streets of Gotham, Robin is loud and happy and shining beside him.
Innocent, Batman thinks for a traitorous second (he is thinking of someone else) before remembering blood-flecked thighs and sharp grins and sobbing (victims) criminals.
Robin needs to learn more control. Batman will instill this in him.
To a degree.
He does not wish to reprogram the boy. Batman needs a Robin who is solely himself. Batman appreciates this Robin for all he is, for his vigor and his enthusiasm and his beauty.
They pause on a rooftop two blocks from where Batman left the car. The building, abandoned except for the homeless on the lowest floors, is slightly taller than those around it, and the cluttered roof is shrouded in shadows.
Batman falls back into the shadows instinctively.
Robin follows him impetuously. He kisses Batman, pressing against the darkness of his uniform like a searchlight.
Batman does not retreat, but he takes several steps back until his shoulders are brushing the cool metal of the roof access door that has long since rusted shut.
Robin tastes like blood and caramel and cigarettes.
Later, he will chastise him. Now, he can do nothing more than give in.
Batman does not moan as he searches deeper for the elusive pure taste of Robin, as he twists and pushes Robin against the wall, as Robin lets out a yelp as his bare thighs press against the cold metal door.
Batman moans when Robin wraps those thighs around his hips, squirming closer and harder against him to avoid skin contact with the door.
His gauntlets rub the drying flakes of blood off Robin’s bare legs as his mouth moves from lips to the jaw line that is beginning to have a more defined cut to the delicate bit of neck just below the hairline, where Robin’s pulse pounds as if he’s in the middle of a fight.
For the briefest moment in time, Batman is devoted entirely to something outside the mission.
And then -
The moment passes. Batman hears the sirens in the distance. Hears people yelling into the night. Feels the weight of everything he isn’t doing even as Robin is heavy in his arms.
He pulls away, abruptly, and takes small pleasure out of Robin’s whimper of protest.
There is still more work yet to be done.
***
The warehouse is too quiet. When Batman drops in, staying in the shadows while he assesses the scene, he discovers that the quartet of gunrunners are indeed present as intel suggested they would be.
They are considerably more deceased than he would have wished.
He does not have to investigate to discover the culprit. Red Hood is leaning against the door frame, stance superficially casual with the machine gun - which the ballistics of the bullets currently in the heads of several gunrunners would undoubtedly match - slung over his shoulder.
“Bruce,” he says cordially. Batman can easily imagine the exact smile currently under the mask, the same one Jason had used when he’d purposefully done something he would disapprove of. Facetious with a sharp edge of angry rebellion.
“Red Hood,” he replies curtly. “Drop the weapon.”
There is no reason to alter his voice to the more menacing tones he uses on most criminals. Red Hood is intimately aware of his capabilities, and theatrics would... cheapen that knowledge.
“What fun would that be?” Red Hood says, stroking the firearm with calculated ease. Flaunting his new liberation from Batman’s ideals. From what he had stood for as Robin.
“Red Hood,” he growls again. There are no civilians alive here to worry about, but Batman will not call him by his given name while standing over his freshly slaughtered handiwork.
Red Hood pulls off his helmet, shakes his head and pulls his gloved hand through his sweat-soaked hair. Batman has performed the same sequence of events countless times, has felt Jason’s eyes during the process, but this is the first time he’s seen his... Jason... Red Hood do so.
“Bruce,” he repeats, eyes still hidden behind a domino that doesn’t make him look like Robin at all, but makes it harder than ever for Batman to continue to label him “Red Hood.”
His hair has the same part, his smirk has the same sharpness, but he isn’t the same, anymore than Batman is the same as he was when this boy had been Robin.
For a moment he wishes his Robin were here, to remind him what he needs now, not what he needed in the past, but for this... for this Batman should be alone.
“Aren’t you going to tell me what a bad boy I’ve been?” Red Hood’s smirk twists into a snarl. “Put me over your knee? Reprimand me?”
He takes a few striding steps toward Batman, then stops abruptly. A dead gunrunner lies less than a meter from his boots. His gun stops swaying from the strap over his shoulder as he stands very still.
“Did you miss me, Batman?” Raw emotion, broken as Bruce felt, was behind every word. “Did you even fucking care?”
Jason - Red Hood's - laughter is different than it used to be. Harsher, meaner. Pained. But for the longest moment, Bruce just wants to close his eyes and listen to it echo through the alley.
Then he steadies himself - mentally, he’s positive that his... lapse was unnoted externally - and prepares for the inevitable altercation.
“I’m disappointed, Jason,” Batman says, looking not at the boy but at the corpse between them. In the darkness of the warehouse the blood appears to be black. He knows that the attack is coming.
He does not block the first punch, the one he recognizes from what seems like thousands of patrols, blurring together in an image of Gotham back then, when everything wasn’t simple and wasn’t innocent but was more so than it is now.
He deserves the bruise he can feel forming.
He does not allow Red Hood a second shot, and fights him as he would any other opponent, showing no more mercy than the situation (his boot slides in cool blood) warrants.
He perhaps shows less brutality than the situation merits (he will never adjust to seeing that face unburnt and unshattered) and Red Hood...
Red Hood knows his earlier methods intimately, and has learned.... He has reached the potential Batman always saw in him.
It is weakness that puts his back to the wall. Weakness that allows Red Hood to get close.
Weakness that sends twinges of hot-sweet sensation through his body when Red Hood is close enough that he can feel his heat, smell his sweat and gunpowder and blood and the faintest, almost imaginary hint of caramel and cigarettes.
When Jason - definitely Jason, there’s nothing unfamiliar about the smile and the cock of his head and the low, desperate noise he makes when he tilts his head up - kisses him, Batman knows what it does and doesn’t mean.
For the longest moment, he doesn’t move. Red Hood has him pinned against the wall and Batman can see the dead men from here and there is an arm at his throat and he could get loose but Jason is kissing him like there hasn’t been a day lost between them.
Batman has not allowed himself to miss this... distraction. He is more efficient now, his Robin is more efficient now, but he reaches up and cradles Jason’s head, wishing for the barest of moments that he could feel more than distant heat through his gauntlet. That he could feel how his fingers twined into Jay’s hair, the way he could with the thinner gloves he’d worn then.
Jason is hard and insistent and angrier than he’d been before, biting Batman’s lip, jaw, the protective curve of costume hiding his jugular hard enough to leave a trail of blood and bruises to match the ones given in the fight.
Batman (Bruce) knows that this moment cannot last. Must not last, because every sigh and groan is a direct assault to his oath.
He is victim to the night, he thinks wildly for a bucking, thrusting moment, with Jason in his hands and mouth and tangled around him palpable as grief. Fallen into the unthinkable and everything he wants in the darkest, most secret moments of midnight.
Forgetting the mission for just one moment of...
Not happiness, not bliss, but pleasure seems too mild to describe the feeling of his boy alive and angry and gasping here, now, so close.
He cannot allow this moment to continue. Can’t let this... lapse pervert everything he’s accomplished.
Everything he believes.
His mission, his oath, is more important than this moment.
Red Hood seems unsurprised when he breaks abruptly away. When he says, “I won’t protect you.”
When he, even quieter, but not a whisper (Batman does not whisper to criminals) says, “You can’t do this anymore, Jason.”
He does not say what he means. Jason would have understood. Red Hood... Red Hood is still an unknown, for all his familiarity.
He retrieves his helmet as Batman watches, as Batman prepares to take him down and hand him over to the police. (Batman cannot arrest him with his hair showing tracks where Batman’s fingers stroked and his swollen lips, bruised throat visible for the world to see. With Jason etched across Red Hood’s violent movements.)
Red Hood is a killer. (Jay is gone.) Batman will not allow a killer to remain on the streets.
He should have expected the small, contained explosion between them - he did not properly disarm his opponent - but Red Hood still manages to escape.
Red Hood has forgotten none of the lessons Batman taught him.
*
When Bruce wakes, he thinks - for a long, breathless moment - that he is still living years before. That Jay may come bounding into his room, still filled with adrenaline from the exploits of the night before.
That he isn’t still alone.
He blames the familiar aches in his body, which feel like every training session he’d had with Jason, combined and intensified. (Jay remembered his lessons well.) He blames...
He knows that he misses him acutely.
He follows his morning routine the same as he would have had the previous night netted him an encounter with Two-Face or the Joker or Black Mask. Alfred is keeping a careful eye on him, and Bruce doesn’t - can’t - acknowledge what they both know to be true.
His parents stare down at him as he enters the library; he silently apologizes to them out of habit.
He did not have a portrait commissioned of Jason. There was nothing about the boy that could be captured in oils and measured brush strokes.
There is a famed photograph of Jason on one of the tables, candid enough to reveal personality. The smirk in this picture is near-identical to the smirk Bruce (impossibly) saw on his face just hours ago.
It hasn’t gotten easier. Bruce thinks that it never will. That every time the constant tide of grief abates into a dull, ignorable ache, something will come along to aggravate it again.
Bruce wishes it weren’t so easy to reconcile the boy he loved with the bitter man he’d encountered. That he could see the Jason he had worried would develop in the way Red Hood cradled his guns.
If he couldn’t see the same youthful rebellion in Red Hood’s maliciousness as he’d seen years ago, in the broken bloody bodies of Robin’s foes.
If he hadn’t seen the empty, easy lies in Jason’s eyes on that balcony on the night long ago. If it weren’t so simple to understand why Jason blamed him for everything.
If he hadn’t blamed himself.
Jason was lost to him. Is lost to him.
The bruises on his jaw ache like farewell kisses.
The manor is empty.
***
“So what was the deal with those gunrunners anyway?” Jason’s mouth is full of pancakes as he asks, and he ignores Alfred’s glare with more aplomb than Bruce ever had.
Bruce doesn’t want to talk about the case. Not now, not when Jason’s eyes are sparkling mischievously in the bright sunlight. He grunts, and holds the paper a little higher, as to block Jason’s view of him.
Alfred has retreated back into the kitchen, and Jason seems to feel it is somewhat appropriate to kick at Bruce lightly under the table, and lighter still until the feel of his foot on Bruce’s thigh is nothing at all like a kick and everything like a caress.
Bruce does not entirely approve of the transition from violence to intimacy, but he cannot deny the tremors it sends through him. He smiles at the stock quotes, and then returns to impassivity as he lowers the paper, folds it neatly, and asks his son what his plans are for the day.
Jason narrows his eyes at him, but just says, “What do you think? School, training, patrol.”
Bruce nods curtly.
He returns home from his duties as Bruce Wayne early, and meets Jason before he opens the clock.
“Stay upstairs with me for a while,” he says. He buries his hands in Jason’s hair, pulls him close and breathes in the faint scent of shampoo. There is a hint of nighttime in his scent, nearly undetectable beneath the soap and sweat, the faintest, acrid tinge of kevlar and explosives.
As if Jason is always Robin underneath a thin veneer of normalcy.
Bruce pulls away abruptly, convinces himself that he is projecting - his own fears, his own worries - and hopes that Jason will come.
Jason, for once, doesn’t ask why, just follows him into the library with his usual swagger.
Bruce isn’t quite sure why it seems so important today to spend time with Jason away from the masks and Gotham and everything that their relationship is built on, only that the thought of going directly to the Cave makes the pit of his stomach drop in a way that years of training has taught him not to ignore.
Fighting and detective work is not science, not precise or guided by sheer fact alone. He has learned to trust his instincts, to hone them and rely on them as much as any other sense at his disposal.
He remembers Robin’s performance the night before, and his own reaction to it, and knows that going out like everything is benign is a mistake.
He understands the spell of the night better than most. The way everything transforms, slightly and irrevocably, when cast into shadow and darkness. The way logic falls second to gut-clenching terror for things that don’t - or ought not - exist. How monsters are formed and how actions that are unthinkable in daylight are suddenly, impossibly easy to perform.
Batman is designed to take advantage of this.
In the brightest, coldest hours of the day, Bruce wonders if maybe the night takes hold of Batman (the memory of Robin’s kiss-swollen lips harsh against his own) in the same way it does everyone else.
If Robin’s presence (blood-splattered thighs under black gauntlets) is likewise mutated.
He hasn’t forgotten his oath. Still knows his methods are the most effective for Gotham. Will not relinquish the mantle.
But he can delay the night’s work long enough to reassess Jason’s progress. To see if his decision had maybe been too hasty. See if his own... bias is interfering with the mission.
Once in the library, Bruce settles in the wing chair that has survived several generations of Waynes. It is only in his imagination that the leather holds the faintest hint of pipe smoke, a memory of childhood evenings spent with his father.
Jason trails his hands along the spines of the books before leaning irreverently against a shelf containing first editions and vellum-bound volumes, knee bent, shoe resting against a book Bruce had sought for months.
His smirk implies that he is all too aware of what he is doing. Bruce does not say a word.
Jason’s knuckles are swollen and bruised, and Bruce wonders how he explains them to his peers. He imagines Jay telling wildly improbable stories about fights over pretty girls, face lit up and illustrating the story with sweeping gestures.
He knows that he doesn’t smile, but Jason’s smirk gives way to a full-fledged grin and he straightens up and moves away from the shelf with only a half-hearted burst of sarcasm.
Jason meanders slowly, footsteps silent on the thick rug, to stand in front of the fireplace. He stares up at the portrait of Thomas and Martha Wayne, and Bruce wants nothing more than for Jason to have met them - seen how happy Bruce had been, once.
“My mother had a set of pearls, once.” Jason’s voice is not precisely quiet, but he makes no effort to punctuate his words with his usual attitude. Jason rarely speaks of the woman his mother had been, only of the situation she had become, and Bruce knows the way words can lodge within your chest, unable to free themselves, no matter how well-trained you have made yourself.
Bruce does not say that his mother died in the necklace that was painted around her neck.
(He still sees those bloody pearls rolling through his dreams, though he cannot remember exactly what her laugh had sounded like anymore, only that gasp and that scream and that bang.)
“She had to sell them, when she started to get sick. She cried more about that than she did later, when she started to hurt. I think they used to be her mother’s, or grandmother’s. Someone dead.”
There is a vault filled with more jewels than his mother had ever had the inclination to wear. Bruce has not looked at them in years.
Jason, in this moment, looks as young as Bruce feels. He wonders if his mother would have moved forward, wrapped her arms around the boy, kissed his temple and whispered... something inspiring.
Bruce does nothing.
The way Jason still eyes the manor with resentment and jealousy and longing fills Bruce with more shame than any of the scars decorating the boy’s body. (Jason came with scars, he came with resentment, but it still -somehow - feels as though Bruce is solely responsible.)
He donates a considerable amount more to causes that directly aid poverty-level minors and their families within Gotham now than he ever had previously.
It doesn’t alleviate his shame, but Bruce finds action to be more cathartic than simply seething uselessly in his own emotions. He always has.
Jason may still be rebellious and fiercely independent and simply fierce, but Bruce cannot think that he is actively malicious. Enthusiastic and less disciplined than he would like, but not... not bad.
Bruce can remember being that age, and how good it had felt to inflict pain on someone who deserved it. Like he was for a second allowing his opponent to feel what he did constantly.
He had grown out of it (mostly). Jason would mature as well, into a man Bruce would be proud to have helped form.
His eyes follow Jason as he straightens, moves away from the portrait, and composes himself into the smirking, laughing boy Bruce loves.
There are shadows stretching deep into the library now that dusk has fallen, and Jason tends to slink into them, his hair and eyes and clothes blending into the darkness, teeth flashing white as he continues to talk about things that don’t matter: movies and cars and starlets. Bruce thinks that the occasional obscenities and crude jests are solely for his benefit, so he has something (reprimands) to add to the conversation.
He is beautiful and bright and tough enough to survive whatever the world throws at them tonight, Bruce thinks. Young and full of life and everything Bruce has not personally felt in years.
Finally, Bruce rises from the shadow his chair is sunk in, and takes several strides towards Jason. In the darkness, Bruce can scarcely remember why he had misgivings.
He rests his hand on Jason’s shoulder. “We should go soon.”
Jason looks startled for the barest of moments before flashing him a sharp, familiar grin. “I’m ready for anything.”
Summary: Later, he will chastise him. Now, he can do nothing more than give in.
Characters: Bruce Wayne (Batman)/Jason Todd (Robin, Red Hood)
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 3741
AN: It’s my birthday, so clearly I must post fic. :D Huge thanks to the marvelous miakun for the beta! Title from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.”
Batman casts a long shadow when he wills it. The silhouette that he has cultivated with infinite care falls across the table in the warehouse, causing a gaggle of gunrunners to drop their cards, gasp and try to push away from the table, tripping over themselves in their sudden panic.
His shadow is still etched across the table when Robin emerges from its darkness, leaping into the fray in a brilliant flash of red and green and yellow.
A few moments later, there is even more red on the scene, oozing and splattering. Batman swoops in, having sufficiently utilized fear to disorient his foes, and dispatches the two remaining men.
Robin, standing with legs spread wide, continues to pound on the leader, whose nose is now an unrecognizable lump on his bloody face.
“Robin.”
Robin looks up, over his shoulder, thighs flecked with glistening red and wide grin irrepressible. “He’s still conscious!” His tone is equal parts defensive and teasing.
It isn’t the response Batman was looking for so he moves across the room in a straight line, stride efficient as he steps over the men he’s knocked cold without a second glance for them. He trusts his handy work.
The gunrunner is still conscious, sobbing and making burbling noises through his crushed nose. It is distasteful, and Batman motions for Robin to move away from the man. He will survive, though he will not be immediately recognizable to his friends upon recovery.
For a second the man looks grateful, until he realizes who has replaced Robin. He tells Batman everything he needed to know, in a garbled, painful rush that, through practice, Batman mostly understands.
Robin languishes against the table, the moonlight that had been instrumental in providing the shadow earlier now shining on him unhampered. His smile is less sharp than it had been moments before, though no more innocent.
Robin used to be more innocent. Batman had to relished that. Now -
Now such open innocence is something he tells himself that he does not desire in his partner. The world has changed.
Robin is still the light to his shadow. The light is simply - brighter, now. More liable to burn. Less innocuous.
More dangerous.
They bind the gunrunners, and exit the scene before any authorities can arrive. Batman will not o explain the men’s conditions to the Commissioner.
When they fly over the streets of Gotham, Robin is loud and happy and shining beside him.
Innocent, Batman thinks for a traitorous second (he is thinking of someone else) before remembering blood-flecked thighs and sharp grins and sobbing (victims) criminals.
Robin needs to learn more control. Batman will instill this in him.
To a degree.
He does not wish to reprogram the boy. Batman needs a Robin who is solely himself. Batman appreciates this Robin for all he is, for his vigor and his enthusiasm and his beauty.
They pause on a rooftop two blocks from where Batman left the car. The building, abandoned except for the homeless on the lowest floors, is slightly taller than those around it, and the cluttered roof is shrouded in shadows.
Batman falls back into the shadows instinctively.
Robin follows him impetuously. He kisses Batman, pressing against the darkness of his uniform like a searchlight.
Batman does not retreat, but he takes several steps back until his shoulders are brushing the cool metal of the roof access door that has long since rusted shut.
Robin tastes like blood and caramel and cigarettes.
Later, he will chastise him. Now, he can do nothing more than give in.
Batman does not moan as he searches deeper for the elusive pure taste of Robin, as he twists and pushes Robin against the wall, as Robin lets out a yelp as his bare thighs press against the cold metal door.
Batman moans when Robin wraps those thighs around his hips, squirming closer and harder against him to avoid skin contact with the door.
His gauntlets rub the drying flakes of blood off Robin’s bare legs as his mouth moves from lips to the jaw line that is beginning to have a more defined cut to the delicate bit of neck just below the hairline, where Robin’s pulse pounds as if he’s in the middle of a fight.
For the briefest moment in time, Batman is devoted entirely to something outside the mission.
And then -
The moment passes. Batman hears the sirens in the distance. Hears people yelling into the night. Feels the weight of everything he isn’t doing even as Robin is heavy in his arms.
He pulls away, abruptly, and takes small pleasure out of Robin’s whimper of protest.
There is still more work yet to be done.
***
The warehouse is too quiet. When Batman drops in, staying in the shadows while he assesses the scene, he discovers that the quartet of gunrunners are indeed present as intel suggested they would be.
They are considerably more deceased than he would have wished.
He does not have to investigate to discover the culprit. Red Hood is leaning against the door frame, stance superficially casual with the machine gun - which the ballistics of the bullets currently in the heads of several gunrunners would undoubtedly match - slung over his shoulder.
“Bruce,” he says cordially. Batman can easily imagine the exact smile currently under the mask, the same one Jason had used when he’d purposefully done something he would disapprove of. Facetious with a sharp edge of angry rebellion.
“Red Hood,” he replies curtly. “Drop the weapon.”
There is no reason to alter his voice to the more menacing tones he uses on most criminals. Red Hood is intimately aware of his capabilities, and theatrics would... cheapen that knowledge.
“What fun would that be?” Red Hood says, stroking the firearm with calculated ease. Flaunting his new liberation from Batman’s ideals. From what he had stood for as Robin.
“Red Hood,” he growls again. There are no civilians alive here to worry about, but Batman will not call him by his given name while standing over his freshly slaughtered handiwork.
Red Hood pulls off his helmet, shakes his head and pulls his gloved hand through his sweat-soaked hair. Batman has performed the same sequence of events countless times, has felt Jason’s eyes during the process, but this is the first time he’s seen his... Jason... Red Hood do so.
“Bruce,” he repeats, eyes still hidden behind a domino that doesn’t make him look like Robin at all, but makes it harder than ever for Batman to continue to label him “Red Hood.”
His hair has the same part, his smirk has the same sharpness, but he isn’t the same, anymore than Batman is the same as he was when this boy had been Robin.
For a moment he wishes his Robin were here, to remind him what he needs now, not what he needed in the past, but for this... for this Batman should be alone.
“Aren’t you going to tell me what a bad boy I’ve been?” Red Hood’s smirk twists into a snarl. “Put me over your knee? Reprimand me?”
He takes a few striding steps toward Batman, then stops abruptly. A dead gunrunner lies less than a meter from his boots. His gun stops swaying from the strap over his shoulder as he stands very still.
“Did you miss me, Batman?” Raw emotion, broken as Bruce felt, was behind every word. “Did you even fucking care?”
Jason - Red Hood's - laughter is different than it used to be. Harsher, meaner. Pained. But for the longest moment, Bruce just wants to close his eyes and listen to it echo through the alley.
Then he steadies himself - mentally, he’s positive that his... lapse was unnoted externally - and prepares for the inevitable altercation.
“I’m disappointed, Jason,” Batman says, looking not at the boy but at the corpse between them. In the darkness of the warehouse the blood appears to be black. He knows that the attack is coming.
He does not block the first punch, the one he recognizes from what seems like thousands of patrols, blurring together in an image of Gotham back then, when everything wasn’t simple and wasn’t innocent but was more so than it is now.
He deserves the bruise he can feel forming.
He does not allow Red Hood a second shot, and fights him as he would any other opponent, showing no more mercy than the situation (his boot slides in cool blood) warrants.
He perhaps shows less brutality than the situation merits (he will never adjust to seeing that face unburnt and unshattered) and Red Hood...
Red Hood knows his earlier methods intimately, and has learned.... He has reached the potential Batman always saw in him.
It is weakness that puts his back to the wall. Weakness that allows Red Hood to get close.
Weakness that sends twinges of hot-sweet sensation through his body when Red Hood is close enough that he can feel his heat, smell his sweat and gunpowder and blood and the faintest, almost imaginary hint of caramel and cigarettes.
When Jason - definitely Jason, there’s nothing unfamiliar about the smile and the cock of his head and the low, desperate noise he makes when he tilts his head up - kisses him, Batman knows what it does and doesn’t mean.
For the longest moment, he doesn’t move. Red Hood has him pinned against the wall and Batman can see the dead men from here and there is an arm at his throat and he could get loose but Jason is kissing him like there hasn’t been a day lost between them.
Batman has not allowed himself to miss this... distraction. He is more efficient now, his Robin is more efficient now, but he reaches up and cradles Jason’s head, wishing for the barest of moments that he could feel more than distant heat through his gauntlet. That he could feel how his fingers twined into Jay’s hair, the way he could with the thinner gloves he’d worn then.
Jason is hard and insistent and angrier than he’d been before, biting Batman’s lip, jaw, the protective curve of costume hiding his jugular hard enough to leave a trail of blood and bruises to match the ones given in the fight.
Batman (Bruce) knows that this moment cannot last. Must not last, because every sigh and groan is a direct assault to his oath.
He is victim to the night, he thinks wildly for a bucking, thrusting moment, with Jason in his hands and mouth and tangled around him palpable as grief. Fallen into the unthinkable and everything he wants in the darkest, most secret moments of midnight.
Forgetting the mission for just one moment of...
Not happiness, not bliss, but pleasure seems too mild to describe the feeling of his boy alive and angry and gasping here, now, so close.
He cannot allow this moment to continue. Can’t let this... lapse pervert everything he’s accomplished.
Everything he believes.
His mission, his oath, is more important than this moment.
Red Hood seems unsurprised when he breaks abruptly away. When he says, “I won’t protect you.”
When he, even quieter, but not a whisper (Batman does not whisper to criminals) says, “You can’t do this anymore, Jason.”
He does not say what he means. Jason would have understood. Red Hood... Red Hood is still an unknown, for all his familiarity.
He retrieves his helmet as Batman watches, as Batman prepares to take him down and hand him over to the police. (Batman cannot arrest him with his hair showing tracks where Batman’s fingers stroked and his swollen lips, bruised throat visible for the world to see. With Jason etched across Red Hood’s violent movements.)
Red Hood is a killer. (Jay is gone.) Batman will not allow a killer to remain on the streets.
He should have expected the small, contained explosion between them - he did not properly disarm his opponent - but Red Hood still manages to escape.
Red Hood has forgotten none of the lessons Batman taught him.
*
When Bruce wakes, he thinks - for a long, breathless moment - that he is still living years before. That Jay may come bounding into his room, still filled with adrenaline from the exploits of the night before.
That he isn’t still alone.
He blames the familiar aches in his body, which feel like every training session he’d had with Jason, combined and intensified. (Jay remembered his lessons well.) He blames...
He knows that he misses him acutely.
He follows his morning routine the same as he would have had the previous night netted him an encounter with Two-Face or the Joker or Black Mask. Alfred is keeping a careful eye on him, and Bruce doesn’t - can’t - acknowledge what they both know to be true.
His parents stare down at him as he enters the library; he silently apologizes to them out of habit.
He did not have a portrait commissioned of Jason. There was nothing about the boy that could be captured in oils and measured brush strokes.
There is a famed photograph of Jason on one of the tables, candid enough to reveal personality. The smirk in this picture is near-identical to the smirk Bruce (impossibly) saw on his face just hours ago.
It hasn’t gotten easier. Bruce thinks that it never will. That every time the constant tide of grief abates into a dull, ignorable ache, something will come along to aggravate it again.
Bruce wishes it weren’t so easy to reconcile the boy he loved with the bitter man he’d encountered. That he could see the Jason he had worried would develop in the way Red Hood cradled his guns.
If he couldn’t see the same youthful rebellion in Red Hood’s maliciousness as he’d seen years ago, in the broken bloody bodies of Robin’s foes.
If he hadn’t seen the empty, easy lies in Jason’s eyes on that balcony on the night long ago. If it weren’t so simple to understand why Jason blamed him for everything.
If he hadn’t blamed himself.
Jason was lost to him. Is lost to him.
The bruises on his jaw ache like farewell kisses.
The manor is empty.
***
“So what was the deal with those gunrunners anyway?” Jason’s mouth is full of pancakes as he asks, and he ignores Alfred’s glare with more aplomb than Bruce ever had.
Bruce doesn’t want to talk about the case. Not now, not when Jason’s eyes are sparkling mischievously in the bright sunlight. He grunts, and holds the paper a little higher, as to block Jason’s view of him.
Alfred has retreated back into the kitchen, and Jason seems to feel it is somewhat appropriate to kick at Bruce lightly under the table, and lighter still until the feel of his foot on Bruce’s thigh is nothing at all like a kick and everything like a caress.
Bruce does not entirely approve of the transition from violence to intimacy, but he cannot deny the tremors it sends through him. He smiles at the stock quotes, and then returns to impassivity as he lowers the paper, folds it neatly, and asks his son what his plans are for the day.
Jason narrows his eyes at him, but just says, “What do you think? School, training, patrol.”
Bruce nods curtly.
He returns home from his duties as Bruce Wayne early, and meets Jason before he opens the clock.
“Stay upstairs with me for a while,” he says. He buries his hands in Jason’s hair, pulls him close and breathes in the faint scent of shampoo. There is a hint of nighttime in his scent, nearly undetectable beneath the soap and sweat, the faintest, acrid tinge of kevlar and explosives.
As if Jason is always Robin underneath a thin veneer of normalcy.
Bruce pulls away abruptly, convinces himself that he is projecting - his own fears, his own worries - and hopes that Jason will come.
Jason, for once, doesn’t ask why, just follows him into the library with his usual swagger.
Bruce isn’t quite sure why it seems so important today to spend time with Jason away from the masks and Gotham and everything that their relationship is built on, only that the thought of going directly to the Cave makes the pit of his stomach drop in a way that years of training has taught him not to ignore.
Fighting and detective work is not science, not precise or guided by sheer fact alone. He has learned to trust his instincts, to hone them and rely on them as much as any other sense at his disposal.
He remembers Robin’s performance the night before, and his own reaction to it, and knows that going out like everything is benign is a mistake.
He understands the spell of the night better than most. The way everything transforms, slightly and irrevocably, when cast into shadow and darkness. The way logic falls second to gut-clenching terror for things that don’t - or ought not - exist. How monsters are formed and how actions that are unthinkable in daylight are suddenly, impossibly easy to perform.
Batman is designed to take advantage of this.
In the brightest, coldest hours of the day, Bruce wonders if maybe the night takes hold of Batman (the memory of Robin’s kiss-swollen lips harsh against his own) in the same way it does everyone else.
If Robin’s presence (blood-splattered thighs under black gauntlets) is likewise mutated.
He hasn’t forgotten his oath. Still knows his methods are the most effective for Gotham. Will not relinquish the mantle.
But he can delay the night’s work long enough to reassess Jason’s progress. To see if his decision had maybe been too hasty. See if his own... bias is interfering with the mission.
Once in the library, Bruce settles in the wing chair that has survived several generations of Waynes. It is only in his imagination that the leather holds the faintest hint of pipe smoke, a memory of childhood evenings spent with his father.
Jason trails his hands along the spines of the books before leaning irreverently against a shelf containing first editions and vellum-bound volumes, knee bent, shoe resting against a book Bruce had sought for months.
His smirk implies that he is all too aware of what he is doing. Bruce does not say a word.
Jason’s knuckles are swollen and bruised, and Bruce wonders how he explains them to his peers. He imagines Jay telling wildly improbable stories about fights over pretty girls, face lit up and illustrating the story with sweeping gestures.
He knows that he doesn’t smile, but Jason’s smirk gives way to a full-fledged grin and he straightens up and moves away from the shelf with only a half-hearted burst of sarcasm.
Jason meanders slowly, footsteps silent on the thick rug, to stand in front of the fireplace. He stares up at the portrait of Thomas and Martha Wayne, and Bruce wants nothing more than for Jason to have met them - seen how happy Bruce had been, once.
“My mother had a set of pearls, once.” Jason’s voice is not precisely quiet, but he makes no effort to punctuate his words with his usual attitude. Jason rarely speaks of the woman his mother had been, only of the situation she had become, and Bruce knows the way words can lodge within your chest, unable to free themselves, no matter how well-trained you have made yourself.
Bruce does not say that his mother died in the necklace that was painted around her neck.
(He still sees those bloody pearls rolling through his dreams, though he cannot remember exactly what her laugh had sounded like anymore, only that gasp and that scream and that bang.)
“She had to sell them, when she started to get sick. She cried more about that than she did later, when she started to hurt. I think they used to be her mother’s, or grandmother’s. Someone dead.”
There is a vault filled with more jewels than his mother had ever had the inclination to wear. Bruce has not looked at them in years.
Jason, in this moment, looks as young as Bruce feels. He wonders if his mother would have moved forward, wrapped her arms around the boy, kissed his temple and whispered... something inspiring.
Bruce does nothing.
The way Jason still eyes the manor with resentment and jealousy and longing fills Bruce with more shame than any of the scars decorating the boy’s body. (Jason came with scars, he came with resentment, but it still -somehow - feels as though Bruce is solely responsible.)
He donates a considerable amount more to causes that directly aid poverty-level minors and their families within Gotham now than he ever had previously.
It doesn’t alleviate his shame, but Bruce finds action to be more cathartic than simply seething uselessly in his own emotions. He always has.
Jason may still be rebellious and fiercely independent and simply fierce, but Bruce cannot think that he is actively malicious. Enthusiastic and less disciplined than he would like, but not... not bad.
Bruce can remember being that age, and how good it had felt to inflict pain on someone who deserved it. Like he was for a second allowing his opponent to feel what he did constantly.
He had grown out of it (mostly). Jason would mature as well, into a man Bruce would be proud to have helped form.
His eyes follow Jason as he straightens, moves away from the portrait, and composes himself into the smirking, laughing boy Bruce loves.
There are shadows stretching deep into the library now that dusk has fallen, and Jason tends to slink into them, his hair and eyes and clothes blending into the darkness, teeth flashing white as he continues to talk about things that don’t matter: movies and cars and starlets. Bruce thinks that the occasional obscenities and crude jests are solely for his benefit, so he has something (reprimands) to add to the conversation.
He is beautiful and bright and tough enough to survive whatever the world throws at them tonight, Bruce thinks. Young and full of life and everything Bruce has not personally felt in years.
Finally, Bruce rises from the shadow his chair is sunk in, and takes several strides towards Jason. In the darkness, Bruce can scarcely remember why he had misgivings.
He rests his hand on Jason’s shoulder. “We should go soon.”
Jason looks startled for the barest of moments before flashing him a sharp, familiar grin. “I’m ready for anything.”